How Google, Facebook and Amazon threaten our Democracy

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian York charts the war over our digital rights. She looks at both how the big corporations have become unaccountable censors, and the devastating impact it has had on those who have been censored.

In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York, looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.

"one of the leading scholars on Internet control and censorship." - Boston Globe

"[Silicon Values] casts a wide-enough net over relevant topics and examples to be richly informative, while still managing to be straightforward in its style. York offers a solid entry point for those who have been following ongoing issues relating to the intersection of politics and technology."" - Library Journal

"Silicon Values traces the haphazard and chaotic creation of the speech principles that now govern the platforms billions of us use to communicate every day ... York's book drags us back to the early, heady days of social media's inception." - New Statesman

"Personal, hands-on expertise makes for some gripping tales, penetrating insight and persuasive advocacy . an important study of free speech under these pervasive social media platforms . full of energy and needed insight" - Irish Times

"Simple, but not simplistic. In this book, the result of more than ten years of work in the field, York travels the world to pick out the most significant cases that show how the decisions made in the tiny Silicon Valley area of California play out on the ground" - ZDNet

"Timely and trenchant . . .York, who for many years has been international activism director at the Electronic Freedom Foundation, certainly knows her stuff. Her proposals for change, however, are clear and democratic, arguing for independent content moderation, social inclusion, and a user-powered movement against the handful of American men who currently run the show from Silicon Valley." - New International

"Timely and trenchant ... [York's] proposals for change ... are clear and democratic" - New Internationalist